


Like New Year's Day

by SouthernBird



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allurance Deserved Better, F/M, Fix it of sorts, Fluff, For 'Cotton Candy' Allurance Zine, Hurt/Comfort, Modern AU, slight alcohol mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 12:29:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17264249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthernBird/pseuds/SouthernBird
Summary: [From "Cotton Candy" - An Allurance Zine]She startles awake with a jerk, curls flinging over her shoulder as she sees the bottle of rosé, empty and suspecting, tap to a stop against the coffee table where the decorations and accents all sit as they were left. Her heart flutters with a brief sting of adrenaline, and all her movement has drawn a whine from her couch mate.Allura’s eyes slip down and over to Lance, who sleeps next to Allura as one of the remnants from the party last night.





	Like New Year's Day

**Author's Note:**

> I have waited months to finally post this story that became a part of "Cotton Candy" which was an Allurance Zine in production during 2018. I figured after what happened with Season 8 and it being New Year's, what better time than now? 
> 
> Yes, this story was inspired by Taylor Swift's "New Year's Day." It suits them terribly much, even with it's more somber feel.

 

Dreams are like the blurred stains of colors in polaroids, ink scribbled in cursive hand the date and occasion bleared with subconscious static, and hers are no different.

 

With each click of a camera of a mind, there it is, the throws of shiny confetti and pops of bubbly champagne, capturing in blinks the clinks of glass flutes and chatter amongst the shadows, all resplendent with shimmers that are like rainbows dimly lit in candlelight wafting apple cinnamon into the air. It’s all an affair, minimalistic and complex, but eventually, dreams fade and then there is sunshine of a morning after.

 

A soft light that glows tangerine behind her eyelids prompts her to shift along the length of her form, clattering a thick bottle of glass to roll from the couch over the rug settle on the cherry wood of a sparsely furnished apartment.

 

She startles awake with a jerk, curls flinging over her shoulder as she sees the bottle of rosé, empty and suspecting, tap to a stop against the coffee table where the decorations and accents all sit as they were left. Her heart flutters with a brief sting of adrenaline, and all her movement has drawn a whine from her couch mate.

 

Allura’s eyes slip down and over to Lance, who sleeps next to Allura as one of the remnants from the party last night.

 

There is glitter all over the floor, shimmering reminders of a dinner party held to tell their small group of mutual friends announcement of the most exciting. It will take weeks, Allura knows, to get each speck of gold out of the rug and off the hardwood floors, and will still be found in decades from then after they live all their mistakes and all their rights.

 

Much to her bemusement, Allura spies her nude heels scattered across the living room as though she flung the painful fashion accessories in her tipsy stupor towards a couch where her fiancé awaited to catch her for cuddle sessions on the couch while the television blared late night infomercials. A laud of midnights it must have been, or attempted to be, and did not last as their aging bones fell on that couch to never move, sleep catching them in its nets to carry them off to dreamlands.

 

Of course, in true juxtaposition, Lance’s shoes are at the door from where he entered their humble home just last night before rightly going to the kitchen to warm up the hors d’oeuvres for their guests once they arrived promptly an hour after.

 

As she watches the drifts of Lance’s breaths in his chest, an easing of up and down while he stays  tepidly entangled in sleep’s net, she thinks upon her being a menace in the kitchen, ladylike in every way not to be when it comes to matters culinary. She is too much like a hapless child playing with garishly colored plastic kitchen wares that is a mastermind of the microwave rather than any sort of amateur cook. Thank goodness for boys that took every step their mother made, who are more enthralled with getting to lick the cake batter off of spoons rather than roll around in the dirt when baking magic was being conjured up with a crack of eggs and a sift of flour.

 

Yes, she thinks, with her fingers along the short strands of hair that stick up and over of her fiancé, thank goodness.

 

Allura does try to be quiet, slips off the couch with a turn that rumples up her skirt, but wool is luckily not too happy to provide friction on faux leather, so she makes it off without disturbing Lance further. Standing up doesn’t help the dread of clean up that is to follow, as it does also, with celebrations with friends, especially when they concern a certain engagement they have kept lips sealed over. With bated breath, Lance and Allura waited for Shiro to return from overseas so that they could invite everyone for their dinner party, so that all of their friends, beloved in all ways, could be there together.

 

However, the inclusion of glitter into the festivities were hardly concocted by the hosts, and Allura will have to figure out which of her two suspects, Pidge and Keith, somehow procured the shimmering speckles.

 

Her shoes are picked up first, perched onto the counter that opens to the kitchen from the living room. She’ll be sure to disinfect later, she promises herself, while pulling out a trash bag to pick up empty bottles of champagne, wine, and water while the floor glimmers below her.

 

The glitter will just have to be a vile parasite that traipses throughout the apartment on the bottom of her feet as she tidies up as vacuuming will be out of the question until Lance wakes up.

 

The plastic bag that promised durability and three layers of protection sags within minutes of Allura playing housekeeper, and she sighs at their silly fantasies of grandeur of having parties that would have no clean up required the day after. There is certainly reason to believe that Lance’s and her phones have a dozen missed calls and messages from all the guests asking if they need to come over and help the newly engaged couple with the mess, but she hardly minds to do it, really. It’s more her fault more than anything, she supposes, having puppy-pouted at Lance for less than a two second span before he agreed to their dinner plans.

 

Simply put, she cannot ask Shiro or anyone else to come over as with each item discarded into her hefty bag, she can smile fondly and know how loved both of them are. Even then, there is the tell all sound of vibrations from her purse; let her enjoy the memories of being with others for just a moment more, even if it’s while being a responsible adult.

 

After all, loneliness is not a stranger to her, more familiar than her own laughter that echoes in the spaces of their home. She, once, held hands with a gloaming figure with smoked edges so they could dance some deranged waltz that kept her away from the hands that might would stand her up, touch her jaw and tell her she is _worth it._

 

She may have inherited her father's charm, but dead fathers are a hard thing to swallow when they're the core of an entire planet for a daughter's heart. It hurt, and she had no guidance— that is, not until she met Lance in a weird set of circumstances almost plucked right from the script of a poor writer’s magnum opus, all the coffee-stained pages of dialogue and scenery written in a local café.

 

Allura, an unfortunate daughter of parents that have long left her, is, in fact, too fortunate for her own good.

 

Then, in her reverie of the past and all the stumbling blocks of tribulation that put her falling right into her fiancé’s path, the neck of a plastic bottle slips from her fingers to scrunch against the dining room table and bounce down to the floor. Barely a gasp seethes between her teeth as she winces, and she hears it, a rustle of rousing from the couch preceding a low grunt. Quietly, she slowly tilts her torso at the hip to peer around the corner of the wall to find the bluest of oceans swimming far across from her.

 

"I am sorry, Lance," she murmurs, worry creeping up like a fly to honey up to her mouth that he might be grumpy from being woken up abruptly. He is usually such a light sleeper, and she frets that she has ruined his chance to actually curl up on a couch and dream of cotton candy trees and sharks in top hats (childhood dream of his, not hers).

 

Lance smiles easy, as he does every morning, handsome and tender as he asks her softly, "why didn’t you wake me up to help?"

 

As Lance rises, the morning sun, well up in a cyan sky, refracts in his blue eyes, and Allura’s breath is lost, stricken out of her lungs as the hues swirl in drifting pearlescent pools. His gaze is soulful, warm, like a roaring fire in winter’s gloomy chill.

 

“You were sleeping, silly,” and she’s smiling too, his infectiously effervescent with each pop of joints as he stands in full to come right over to her. It’s a rush of motion despite his languid gait, but there is a pair of lips on her forehead and a hand taking away the trash. Her duties are now relinquished, and Lance has substituted himself in so that she might… rest.

 

For all that she is, Allura tries, she does, even so much as going into the kitchen to scrounge up breakfast for the both of them. Poor Lance hardly gets a reprieve, hardly gets the promise of a warm meal when the fire alarm goes off because Allura set the toaster too close to the wall and she set the dial on a little too long.

 

Instead of whipping up a good meal with some kind of concoction, presumably crepes and bacon, Lance just pulls out his phone and makes a delivery order through an app that does all the hard work for them. She’s a little grateful as he reaches to squeeze her hand, his eyes heavy with need for another hour or two of sleep, that he isn’t dirtying up more pans and plates in their need for nourishment.

 

However, it’s probably the strangest thing— now commonplace in her life— to be sat down on the couch to have Lance work on cleaning up. He is methodical, unlike her previous lovers that preferred eclectic means to spruce up a space of the discarded trash, and it’s a godsend when he is pulling out the broom and the mop. Every attempt Allura makes to rally herself back into the war on after party garbage has her being put right back down with a pointed look and a shake of a dust rag.

 

“No, ma’am, sit yourself right down. I got this.”

 

“Lance.”

 

And it will always be like this, will it? Will it always be taxi rides from fancy restaurants, holding hands in the darkness between them while the raindrops on windows are the only eyes peering into their world? Will it always been dancing to silly pop songs on Saturday mornings after eating sugary cereal and egg scramble? Will she always look at Lance and feel not a spark, not the fireworks of sudden celebratory finesse, but a slow candle burn, something sure and comforting?

 

With a glance of blues, of happy skies and cloudy dreams of an eternal summer that will never fade into the bleaker hues of sundown, Allura breathes in deep and it rings clear; they are forevermore.

 

Soon, Lance and those blues are all she sees, tidying up a forgotten battle so that he can cup her cheeks, enraptured by her as he murmurs in the reverent calm of night tides along shorelines, “if I go one day not telling you I love you, I think I’d just rather not talk at all. Have I ever told you that?”

 

And, that is it. _This_ is it. It’s there in his eyes, in his touch, in the memories of his laughter that she will recognize in the echoes of photo albums years from now.

 

Love for her is like New Year’s Day, when the fancy ball has dropped and the fireworks have fizzled out with dim dawn rising across the cityscape after the crackle and the pop is lost in jumbled lyrics of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ It is like waking up to another three-hundred sixty-five days gone, and yet just another beginning to their tale, a slow epiphany of second chances that culminates there between them.


End file.
